Currently, there are a very limited number of tools available on the market for looking at serial data. Generally, designers currently look at serial data using logic analyzers or deep memory oscilloscopes. Logic analyzers are used to capture clocked serial data. Once the logic analyzer captures the serial data, the user is required to sift through long vertical one-bit-wide columns of data, which may be thousands of bits deep. Deep memory oscilloscopes are used to capture unclocked serial data, which is even more prevalent than clocked serial data, and to look at the captured data one bit at a time.
Logic analyzers and deep memory oscilloscopes which are currently available on the market do not provide the designer with a convenient, easy-to-read format, but rather require the designer to sift through a great number of bits of data to find the information the designer is seeking. The designer is confronted with a task analogous to the task a software designer is confronted with in attempting to debug a program by looking at instructions in machine code.
Protocol analyzers have also been used to analyze serial data. However, protocol analyzers available on the market are protocol-specific and currently address only the most widely used communications protocols, including SDLC, Ethernet and FDDI. There are literally thousands of communications protocols currently in use throughout the world for which protocol analyzers have not been developed. Also, existing protocol analyzers do not provide the functionality of time correlating events in one processor of a system with events occurring in another processor of the system, and/or with events occurring on the system communications channel.
Accordingly, a need exists for a general purpose serial data analyzer which is capable of being implemented with a plurality of protocols, which presents data to the user in a format which is convenient and easy to view, and which allows events occurring in different components of a system to be correlated in time.